Starting Over: The Life of Herman Ernst Sheets - Softcover

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Hermann Chitz's life, which began quietly in 1908 in the Kingdom of Saxony, was to span a century and two continents. He escaped to America from Hitler's Europe; his parents, assimilated Jews, stayed behind. With a Prague doctorate and patent in hand, he landed in New York in 1939, and changed his name--starting over as Herman Sheets.

In wartime he worked on critical aspects of the atomic bomb that would end the Second World War. In peacetime he directed research and development for Electric Boat's nuclear submarine program. At the peak of his career, in a single year, his wife died unexpectedly and he was fired for displeasing Admiral Hyman Rickover.

As a single parent, with three of his six children still at home, he started his career over again in the University of Rhode Island. Not until his own children were educated and launched did he remarry and take on an expanded family. This is the remarkable story of an immigrant, inventor, ocean engineer, technical consultant, and family man who consistently turned difficult transition into new beginnings.

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From Chapter 1, "Life in Germany and Czechoslovakia"

Although Oskar [Kraus] was one of the more famous members of the family, my grandmother continued to think of him as her idealistic and impractical younger brother, always in need of her unsolicited advice. As I recall, she summed up his friends, efforts, and accomplishments like this: "First Oskar gets interested in and spends most of his career writing about Brentano. He could have picked someone noncontroversial to spend his time on, but no, he has to pick Brentano, the only professor to ever be expelled from the University of Vienna. And why was Brentano expelled? Because in 1894 he decided to argue that the Pope was not `infallible,' a remarkably stupid thing to do in Vienna, the self-appointed capital of the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire.

"Next, what does Oskar get involved in? He supports hiring at the University of Prague some controversial civil servant from the Swiss Patent Office who isn't even a lawyer. This Einstein wants to change all the laws of physics! First of all, no one understands anything he talks about. Everyone knows about Newton and the apple, how does he refute that? I don't even think Oskar believes what Einstein is saying."

"Then Oskar gets involved with all those Czechoslovak nationalists. You know, like that former professor, Tomás Masaryk, and his like-minded friends. The fact that both Masaryk and Oskar studied in Vienna with that expelled Professor Brentano clearly indicates that they have no practical sense. Also, anyone with any sense knows that the biggest tragedy of the Great War was the break-up of the Austrian Empire into all these silly little countries with no history and no culture!"

"And as for his friend Albert Schweitzer, well at least he is not controversial. He has a lot of degrees and is well intentioned, but, like Oskar, has no practical sense. He is off in Africa so no one has any idea what he is doing or who he is." "And finally, Oskar makes friends with Bertrand Russell in England. What good is a friend like him? He's the most controversial person in the universe. What can you say about a mathematician who thinks he is a philosopher?"

From Chapter 4, "My Years at Electric Boat" (where Herman Sheets was in charge of R&D on nuclear submarines and other products)

Ironically, one of our commercially successful projects led to a major Navy program, thanks to a secret ride that Rickover took on the Aluminaut....

We decided to take Admiral Rickover by rental car from the hotel in Miami to Miami Beach, where Bill Jones had rented a motorboat -- again, not too fancy and not too skimpy but entirely shipshape and captained by an extremely efficient retired Navy Chief -- to take up to six people to the Aluminaut and back. Then Mr. Jones went in search of seedless grapes.

Admiral Rickover was a frugal eater, but with a fondness for grapes. Early in his history with submarines, crews provided him with grapes when he toured a vessel. As he toured, munching grapes, his mind was always on submarine tests and other important events on his schedule, so he would spit the seeds and sometimes the skins on the floor. Submarine skippers prided themselves on having perfectly clean submarines for the acceptance tests, which Admiral Rickover attended, so the specifications were changed: Admiral Rickover was to be provided only with seedless grapes with edible skin. Bill Jones was having trouble finding seedless grapes, as most of them had been shipped north and only a few specialty fruit stores had them. After he found the grapes, Mr. Jones drove me to the airport for my flight back to Groton. My plane left 10 minutes before the admiral's plane arrived.

Apparently Admiral Rickover's trip with his assistants was a big success. On the vessel and afterward, he lectured his assistants that they could not create something so simple, rugged, and reliable for only three million dollars. Eventually it was said that his trip aboard the Aluminaut resulted in the specifications for the world's smallest nuclear research submarine, the NR-1, which was launched in 1969. The NR-1 was used for military surveillance and marine research at mid-ocean depths (3,000 feet). In the early 1970s, Reynolds donated the Aluminaut to the Science Museum of Virginia.